The elusive internet flattening: 10 years of IXP growth

The work

AuthorsTimm Böttger; Gianni Antichi; Eder L. Fernandes; Roberto di Lallo; Marc Bruyere; Steve Uhlig; Ignacio Castro
Editors
Typepreprint
Year2018
Also known asbottgerelusive
Citekeybottger2018elusive

Where it appeared

PublisherarXiv

Identifiers

arXiv1810.10963
DOI10.48550/arxiv.1810.10963
OpenAlexW2898099973

Access

Landing pagehttps://arxiv.org/abs/1810.10963

Abstract

Over the past decade, IXPs have been playing a key role in enabling interdomain connectivity. Their traffic volumes have quickly become similar to those of Tier-1 ASes and their physical presence has spread across the world. While the relevance of IXPs is undeniable, their contribution to the shaping of the current Internet is not fully understood yet, especially on the so-called “flattening” phenomenon. In this paper, we disentangle “flattening” from “path shortening”: we show that the impact of IXPs on path-length is limited. Surprisingly, Internet path-lengths have globally barely decreased over the last decade, regardless of whether they cross IXPs or not. Instead of a “path-shortening”, we observe a diversion of the routes away from the central Tier-1 ASes, supported by IXPs. This diversion has however not fundamentally changed the existence of a hierarchy, but rather replaced the central Tier-1s with a new set of players.

A copy is held

pdf, 2.5 MB. Not published — it may be under copyright. The facts and links here are.

How it got here

How it got hereimport via bibtex
Added2026-08-04 00:00 UTC
Approved bya person 2026-08-25 13:32 UTC

Filed under

lectures uhlig who-the-internet-depends-on

Cite it as

@unpublished{bottger2018elusive,
  title        = {The elusive internet flattening: 10 years of IXP growth},
  author       = {Timm Böttger and Gianni Antichi and Eder L. Fernandes and Roberto di Lallo and Marc Bruyere and Steve Uhlig and Ignacio Castro},
  year         = {2018},
  publisher    = {arXiv},
  eprint       = {1810.10963},
  doi          = {10.48550/arxiv.1810.10963},
}

This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/bottger2018elusive/ and will keep doing so. It used to be called bottgerelusive, and those addresses still resolve to this one.